Most online bookings are patients you already had.

A practice that adds online booking sees a large jump in bookings made outside office hours, and most of those are existing patients who would have telephoned.

That is a genuine operational win — fewer calls, fewer missed bookings — and it is not a marketing result, however it looks on a dashboard.

Counting all online bookings as a channel therefore credits the booking widget with a large share of the practice's revenue.

Splitting new from returning is the first thing this report does, and for most practices it removes the majority of the volume before any ranking begins.

What remains is small, real, and finally comparable with the paid channels.

Where a booking records that it came from a map listing or the practice website, that is genuinely useful, and it is also the last step rather than the cause.

Somebody who saw an advert, searched the practice by name and booked from the website will be recorded as a website booking.

The report uses the referrer as one source among several and keeps the paid lead files beside it, so the overlap between them is visible rather than resolved.

Where a patient appears in both an advertising lead file and a website booking, the report shows both rather than silently awarding the cheaper one.

That restraint is what stops the widget quietly absorbing credit for everything upstream of it.

Online bookings cancel and no-show at a different rate from telephone bookings, because making one costs the patient less commitment.

Ranking channels on bookings therefore favours the sources that make booking easiest rather than the ones producing patients who attend.

Matching to collected production removes the problem entirely: revenue only exists where somebody turned up and paid.

The gap between bookings and collections per source is worth reporting on its own, because it is often an operations finding about reminders rather than a marketing one.

A new patient's first appointment is an examination, and the significant production frequently follows weeks or months later once treatment is agreed.

A short window measures the examination, which is nearly the same for every channel, and misses the part where channels differ.

A year of collections matched back to the acquisition booking gives the number that actually distinguishes them.

It also shows which channels produce patients who accept treatment, which is a far better predictor of a practice's year than new-patient counts.

Acceptance is where the money is decided, and it varies by how the patient arrived. Somebody who booked at midnight from a map listing because a tooth hurt is a different proposition from somebody who chose the practice after a recommendation, and the ledger is the only place that difference becomes a number.